Ken Barnes -- A Eulogy
Ken Barnes was my brother. He passed away on February 25, 2015. I was his only sibling, and I am honored to speak about him today. He was a good brother and we had an “interesting” childhood, an understatement, to be sure. We had a good relationship and always enjoyed that we were born and raised in Philadelphia, in Greek, “The city of brotherly love,” but the story actually begins a few years before that.
Our father, John Barnes, was born in Philadelphia in 1913, but he had no knowledge of who his father was. Back in those days this was a very bad thing, and the term which would later describe his mother, “single-parent household,” had not yet been invented. His one surprise encounter with his father, when John was just six years old, had not been a good one. But in several months, the Great Influenza Pandemic which struck and killed about a third of the population of Philadelphia in 1919, also took his father. So our father’s childhood was a difficult one. But he did swear one thing to himself. If he ever had children, he would do right by them, and, as he would later say, “By God I did!” I can confirm that.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, young men of fighting age lined up by the hundreds to have their quick physicals before they would be trained and go off to war. Our father stood in that endless line of young men in their white T-shirts and boxer shorts as the doctor went down the row, one at a time. When he got to John he stopped and said, “Son, you don’t look so well. How are you feeling today?”
Our father looked pale and was perspiring, even bent over a little bit. But before anyone could voice that he might just be afraid to go to war, what was causing his symptoms came to light. Standing right in front of the doctor, his appendix burst on the spot, and he collapsed. It was fortunate that the doctor was there to help save him, and he was taken to the hospital, but that was the end of the war for him. As it turned out, that roomful of new inductees were the ones who would storm Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944, and with devastating carnage. So there is no guarantee that, had our father’s appendix not burst, at just the right moment, neither of us would have been born.
Dad worked at a laboratory equipment company, the Arthur H. Thomas Company, in downtown Philly, where he met a lovely young secretary, Florence Johnson. They married on September 23rd, 1939. He made sure to wait longer than the allotted nine months, so no one could ever say of his child, what had so hurtfully, been said of him. But the story gets better.
Ken would be born on August 14, 1945, which was a very special day. As our father related it, there was celebration in the streets down below my mother’s hospital window, but they were not celebrating Ken’s birth. It was VJ-Day, Victory over Japan—the end of World War II. Calendars now mark that day as August 15th, (coincidentally Ken’s firstborn’s, Wyatt’s, birthday). You see, the signing of the documents on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri took place on the other side of the world, but more importantly, on the other side of the international timeline, so what in Philadelphia was August 14th, was already August 15th in Japan. So Ken actually had the distinction of being one of the very first babies born “after the war.” He was a trailblazer for millions of others who would later be called, “Baby-boomers.” I had the distinction of joining that group 22 months later.
Our childhood was dominated, to a certain extent, by Ken’s intellectual ability, even as a small child. He read voraciously and had an interest in things the kids around him didn’t even know existed.
A great aunt, our father’s mother’s sister, Anna, had a problem with her heart and a surgery was performed on her at the Hahnemann Hospital in the mid-1950s. The surgeons had done a “heart-valve transplant,” and it was one of the very first such surgeries ever to be conducted. It was a big deal.
When we visited her a few days later, Ken, then about ten-years old, told my father he wanted to talk with one of the surgeons, and a few of the doctors were nearby. My father made the overture and one doctor was very accommodating. He assumed Ken wanted to ask him something like, “Will Aunt Anna get better?” or just, “What surgery did you do?”
The doctor bent over, shook Ken’s hand, and introduced himself. He stood and said aloud, “I understand this young man wants to ask me a question.”
Ken looked up at him and said, “When I get a splinter in my finger, my body doesn’t like it and rejects it. It gets infected. I don’t understand why Aunt Anna’s body doesn’t reject the new heart valve?”
To say the doctor was astonished would be an understatement. “Rejection” as a medical concept, with anything that was not native to the body, had been the main stopping block for these surgeries for years, and they were hoping that with the newest serums, they had overcome it to save Anna’s life. But that could not possibly be something such a “young man” could understand.
The doctor’s three colleagues overheard what the ten-year old had said, and they gathered around him, all staring down at Ken. If you recall the story in the Bible where Jesus, as a boy in the temple, was speaking to the rabbis in a most learned fashion, as they had gathered around him, this scene in the hospital painted that very same picture. And that is only one example of what it was like to be Ken’s “little brother.”
We attended the Cedar Park Presbyterian Church in West Oak Lane, and there, probably around the age of 12, Ken met the lovely little Loretta Wagner. They became your classic “childhood sweethearts,” went to the proms together, he went to Penn State, and she to Ursinus College twenty miles from Philadelphia. They married on December 30th 1969, and I was proud to be their best man.
Ken and I both attended Penn State. I took classes in Liberal Arts as a Political Science major bound for law school at Villanova University. But one thing for which I am, perhaps, most grateful to my brother was his introducing me to the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. (Before a late teenager you know becomes too wired and ensconced in the very liberal philosophies propounded at most universities today, I recommend you give them a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and tell them it will change their lives and their whole perspective—for the much better. It did mine.)
At Penn State, Ken had earned a Grade Point Average (GPA) of 3.9, (out of 4.0), in Industrial Engineering. He had also taken all of the graduate-level courses available in anatomy and, what was then, computers, which, to me, mostly involved data kept on 3 x 8 cards filing by faster than the eye could count. But Ken understood much more about them. He had been accepted at the University of Michigan for the Master’s program in Bioengineering, which he described as “the construction of false, moveable body parts.” Think, Aunt Anna and her transplanted heart valve, but one created by a bioengineer. While at Penn State he had worked on heart and brain-link tests on “donor dogs.” These were forerunners to the work that culminated in the invention of the Jarvik-8 heart.
Because of his perfect score in the Graduate Record Exam, Ken was awarded a scholarship for the Master’s program, so he also signed up for courses for a Master’s in Business Administration. After two years, he had Aced every course and left Ann Arbor with Loretta and two Master’s degrees, bound for Chicago, where he worked at the pharmaceutical company, GD Searle. Not satisfied there, he decided to follow through past the MBA.
He once wrote to me about one perspective on management, “People who control people, control people who control only things, but people who control money, control all.” He wanted to do both, to be able to determine where the money would go.
He decided to pursue a CPA, but had not taken more than a couple of accounting course in his studies. So he took dozens of what were then called, “correspondences courses,” in accounting, and earned his CPA with one of the highest grades in the country on the national exam. He also became a Mensa member, the classic smart-person’s group, with a controlled test grading him with an IQ of 165. People like this don’t actually “work” for someone. They pursue what they find interesting and make money along the way.
Along that way, Ken and Loretta had three children, Wyatt, Morgan, and Dana, born in 1972, ’74, and ’76. The Barnes boys somehow skipped 1978, but my own five children started coming along with boys in 1980, ’82, and ’84, and the girls in ’89 and ’91. My father always wondered about what happened with no grandchild in 1978, but he didn’t complain because he was happy for the ones he had.
Ken once told me that when he raised his children he treated them as “individuals,” and did not necessarily want them treated “equally.” For Christmas presents, for example, he gave his children whatever was right for them, for Wyatt, binoculars for his birdwatching, and for Morgan, a drawing desk for her arts and crafts. With his children he was a member of many places: the Zoo, Art Museums, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and he got their newsletters. On Saturdays he would take the children on trips, places like dog shows and Boy Scout Camporees. Sometimes they would go to the zoo, not just to see the animals, but for some special moments, like to see and hear the lions roar when they were fed.
Ken loved his children, but he wasn’t the kind of person who would use those words. As I have done with mine, and in all eight of these first-cousins Ken and I--and our wives—have produced, there is a sense of honesty and integrity. I can speak about that, having served as a Special Agent in the FBI for 29 years. All of these BarnesKids have a certain “sense of justice.” We thought that was important for them all, individually, and for the world at-large. If more young people had been raise that way, many of the problems we see today, likely, wouldn’t be there at all.
With two of his children living right down the road in Longmont, Ken moved here to Boulder a few years ago. And with his first grandson, Dana’s son, Brandon, now, 18, Ken was that much closer to more family. Of course Morgan, living with her family just outside of Baltimore has two of her own, Derek and Haley, but Ken’s disability pretty much kept him in one location.
And about that disability—sometime when they lived near Philadelphia, when Wyatt was about 14, in the mid-1980s, he took a martial arts course. Ken was nearby in the class, with all the others on the wooden floor, trying to keep up. When some maneuver required them to stand on one leg and raise the other, Ken faltered, and then he went down. That was the first moment he realized something was amiss, and it would be incrementally debilitating for the rest of his life. While his overt symptoms gave the impression of multiple sclerosis, the internal symptoms showed it was not. MS has scar tissue on the sheathing tubes around the nerves, but he never had any of that. After seeing dozens of doctors over decades, not one could make a final clarification of exactly what he had. But it is certain others are out there, given the number of humans that occupy the planet. It could be like ALS, which wasn’t well known until New York Yankees star Lou Gehrig got it. Maybe doctors will someday quantify Ken’s condition and name it after him. It would be fitting for the unique individual that he was.
I will miss him, and those who ever met him know we have all lost a good one. At age 69, he left us way before his time should have come.
Wayne A. Barnes
Boulder, Colorado
February 28, 2015
Our father, John Barnes, was born in Philadelphia in 1913, but he had no knowledge of who his father was. Back in those days this was a very bad thing, and the term which would later describe his mother, “single-parent household,” had not yet been invented. His one surprise encounter with his father, when John was just six years old, had not been a good one. But in several months, the Great Influenza Pandemic which struck and killed about a third of the population of Philadelphia in 1919, also took his father. So our father’s childhood was a difficult one. But he did swear one thing to himself. If he ever had children, he would do right by them, and, as he would later say, “By God I did!” I can confirm that.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, young men of fighting age lined up by the hundreds to have their quick physicals before they would be trained and go off to war. Our father stood in that endless line of young men in their white T-shirts and boxer shorts as the doctor went down the row, one at a time. When he got to John he stopped and said, “Son, you don’t look so well. How are you feeling today?”
Our father looked pale and was perspiring, even bent over a little bit. But before anyone could voice that he might just be afraid to go to war, what was causing his symptoms came to light. Standing right in front of the doctor, his appendix burst on the spot, and he collapsed. It was fortunate that the doctor was there to help save him, and he was taken to the hospital, but that was the end of the war for him. As it turned out, that roomful of new inductees were the ones who would storm Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944, and with devastating carnage. So there is no guarantee that, had our father’s appendix not burst, at just the right moment, neither of us would have been born.
Dad worked at a laboratory equipment company, the Arthur H. Thomas Company, in downtown Philly, where he met a lovely young secretary, Florence Johnson. They married on September 23rd, 1939. He made sure to wait longer than the allotted nine months, so no one could ever say of his child, what had so hurtfully, been said of him. But the story gets better.
Ken would be born on August 14, 1945, which was a very special day. As our father related it, there was celebration in the streets down below my mother’s hospital window, but they were not celebrating Ken’s birth. It was VJ-Day, Victory over Japan—the end of World War II. Calendars now mark that day as August 15th, (coincidentally Ken’s firstborn’s, Wyatt’s, birthday). You see, the signing of the documents on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri took place on the other side of the world, but more importantly, on the other side of the international timeline, so what in Philadelphia was August 14th, was already August 15th in Japan. So Ken actually had the distinction of being one of the very first babies born “after the war.” He was a trailblazer for millions of others who would later be called, “Baby-boomers.” I had the distinction of joining that group 22 months later.
Our childhood was dominated, to a certain extent, by Ken’s intellectual ability, even as a small child. He read voraciously and had an interest in things the kids around him didn’t even know existed.
A great aunt, our father’s mother’s sister, Anna, had a problem with her heart and a surgery was performed on her at the Hahnemann Hospital in the mid-1950s. The surgeons had done a “heart-valve transplant,” and it was one of the very first such surgeries ever to be conducted. It was a big deal.
When we visited her a few days later, Ken, then about ten-years old, told my father he wanted to talk with one of the surgeons, and a few of the doctors were nearby. My father made the overture and one doctor was very accommodating. He assumed Ken wanted to ask him something like, “Will Aunt Anna get better?” or just, “What surgery did you do?”
The doctor bent over, shook Ken’s hand, and introduced himself. He stood and said aloud, “I understand this young man wants to ask me a question.”
Ken looked up at him and said, “When I get a splinter in my finger, my body doesn’t like it and rejects it. It gets infected. I don’t understand why Aunt Anna’s body doesn’t reject the new heart valve?”
To say the doctor was astonished would be an understatement. “Rejection” as a medical concept, with anything that was not native to the body, had been the main stopping block for these surgeries for years, and they were hoping that with the newest serums, they had overcome it to save Anna’s life. But that could not possibly be something such a “young man” could understand.
The doctor’s three colleagues overheard what the ten-year old had said, and they gathered around him, all staring down at Ken. If you recall the story in the Bible where Jesus, as a boy in the temple, was speaking to the rabbis in a most learned fashion, as they had gathered around him, this scene in the hospital painted that very same picture. And that is only one example of what it was like to be Ken’s “little brother.”
We attended the Cedar Park Presbyterian Church in West Oak Lane, and there, probably around the age of 12, Ken met the lovely little Loretta Wagner. They became your classic “childhood sweethearts,” went to the proms together, he went to Penn State, and she to Ursinus College twenty miles from Philadelphia. They married on December 30th 1969, and I was proud to be their best man.
Ken and I both attended Penn State. I took classes in Liberal Arts as a Political Science major bound for law school at Villanova University. But one thing for which I am, perhaps, most grateful to my brother was his introducing me to the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. (Before a late teenager you know becomes too wired and ensconced in the very liberal philosophies propounded at most universities today, I recommend you give them a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and tell them it will change their lives and their whole perspective—for the much better. It did mine.)
At Penn State, Ken had earned a Grade Point Average (GPA) of 3.9, (out of 4.0), in Industrial Engineering. He had also taken all of the graduate-level courses available in anatomy and, what was then, computers, which, to me, mostly involved data kept on 3 x 8 cards filing by faster than the eye could count. But Ken understood much more about them. He had been accepted at the University of Michigan for the Master’s program in Bioengineering, which he described as “the construction of false, moveable body parts.” Think, Aunt Anna and her transplanted heart valve, but one created by a bioengineer. While at Penn State he had worked on heart and brain-link tests on “donor dogs.” These were forerunners to the work that culminated in the invention of the Jarvik-8 heart.
Because of his perfect score in the Graduate Record Exam, Ken was awarded a scholarship for the Master’s program, so he also signed up for courses for a Master’s in Business Administration. After two years, he had Aced every course and left Ann Arbor with Loretta and two Master’s degrees, bound for Chicago, where he worked at the pharmaceutical company, GD Searle. Not satisfied there, he decided to follow through past the MBA.
He once wrote to me about one perspective on management, “People who control people, control people who control only things, but people who control money, control all.” He wanted to do both, to be able to determine where the money would go.
He decided to pursue a CPA, but had not taken more than a couple of accounting course in his studies. So he took dozens of what were then called, “correspondences courses,” in accounting, and earned his CPA with one of the highest grades in the country on the national exam. He also became a Mensa member, the classic smart-person’s group, with a controlled test grading him with an IQ of 165. People like this don’t actually “work” for someone. They pursue what they find interesting and make money along the way.
Along that way, Ken and Loretta had three children, Wyatt, Morgan, and Dana, born in 1972, ’74, and ’76. The Barnes boys somehow skipped 1978, but my own five children started coming along with boys in 1980, ’82, and ’84, and the girls in ’89 and ’91. My father always wondered about what happened with no grandchild in 1978, but he didn’t complain because he was happy for the ones he had.
Ken once told me that when he raised his children he treated them as “individuals,” and did not necessarily want them treated “equally.” For Christmas presents, for example, he gave his children whatever was right for them, for Wyatt, binoculars for his birdwatching, and for Morgan, a drawing desk for her arts and crafts. With his children he was a member of many places: the Zoo, Art Museums, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and he got their newsletters. On Saturdays he would take the children on trips, places like dog shows and Boy Scout Camporees. Sometimes they would go to the zoo, not just to see the animals, but for some special moments, like to see and hear the lions roar when they were fed.
Ken loved his children, but he wasn’t the kind of person who would use those words. As I have done with mine, and in all eight of these first-cousins Ken and I--and our wives—have produced, there is a sense of honesty and integrity. I can speak about that, having served as a Special Agent in the FBI for 29 years. All of these BarnesKids have a certain “sense of justice.” We thought that was important for them all, individually, and for the world at-large. If more young people had been raise that way, many of the problems we see today, likely, wouldn’t be there at all.
With two of his children living right down the road in Longmont, Ken moved here to Boulder a few years ago. And with his first grandson, Dana’s son, Brandon, now, 18, Ken was that much closer to more family. Of course Morgan, living with her family just outside of Baltimore has two of her own, Derek and Haley, but Ken’s disability pretty much kept him in one location.
And about that disability—sometime when they lived near Philadelphia, when Wyatt was about 14, in the mid-1980s, he took a martial arts course. Ken was nearby in the class, with all the others on the wooden floor, trying to keep up. When some maneuver required them to stand on one leg and raise the other, Ken faltered, and then he went down. That was the first moment he realized something was amiss, and it would be incrementally debilitating for the rest of his life. While his overt symptoms gave the impression of multiple sclerosis, the internal symptoms showed it was not. MS has scar tissue on the sheathing tubes around the nerves, but he never had any of that. After seeing dozens of doctors over decades, not one could make a final clarification of exactly what he had. But it is certain others are out there, given the number of humans that occupy the planet. It could be like ALS, which wasn’t well known until New York Yankees star Lou Gehrig got it. Maybe doctors will someday quantify Ken’s condition and name it after him. It would be fitting for the unique individual that he was.
I will miss him, and those who ever met him know we have all lost a good one. At age 69, he left us way before his time should have come.
Wayne A. Barnes
Boulder, Colorado
February 28, 2015